


Whatever You Want to Call It

by sovay



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Drift Compatibility, M/M, Poor Life Choices, Roommates, Sexual Tension, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 14:58:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15342342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sovay/pseuds/sovay
Summary: No one wants to live with half their brain.





	Whatever You Want to Call It

No one wants to live with half their brain.

When Hermann Gottlieb thinks this, he doesn't mean that he doesn't want to live brain-damaged (although he doesn't) or even that he's bad company for himself (though he's never been congenial to anyone). He means that he knows bloody well how it works in the Drift and if he and Newton Geiszler are the left and right halves of a brain, being stuck with Newt in a London bedsit with a skylight that drops rust on whoever tries to push it open and a toilet that sounds like the destruction of Macau when it flushes is a peculiarly Platonic kind of hell, Aristophanes' origins of love given a field-test and failing. Newt snores, for one thing. He washes his skinny ties in the terrifying sink and leaves them drying over the stove. He stays awake all night bopping his head to music he isn't even playing and making notes to himself that start to crawl up his arms when he runs out of paper. His attitude toward dishes, especially dishes that he might have dissected something in and forgotten to tell Hermann, should be prohibited on the grounds of health and safety by the NHS. And Hermann knows to the last nanometer of a neuron exactly how extraordinary, foolhardy, honest, and geekily, smokingly hot the man who is achieving these superlative heights of annoyance is. Which is perhaps the only reason he hasn't killed Newt and dumped his body out the window, although another is that getting the window open is trickier than it sounds and sometimes, especially if it's a bad day for his back, he needs Newt's help.

The chain of events that led to the bedsit is gallingly hazier than he feels it really should be, although he knows it all started to go wrong when Newt said he knew a guy. Somehow the picture Hermann obtained of the situation was a good friend in London with a flat near King's where he might be persuaded to let Newt and Hermann crash for the week, so they wouldn't have to cope with a hotel on top of the conference. It's the way Hermann is fine with cramped situations when everyone has a job to do and does it and leaves him to do his own, but the more people mill aimlessly about a room and crowd him in the hallways and treat his cane like an affectation and shoulder past him as if his space is rightfully theirs, the more elaborately Germanic and uncontainably acerbic he becomes and the more likely he is to insult someone who hasn't just stepped on his foot or stuck their own down their throat in a moment of ableism, he's well aware of this pattern and he appreciates Newt noticing, although in characteristic fashion Newt expressed it as _that thing where you bite people's heads off for breathing too loudly after two days._ It was kind of him, to think of getting them somewhere quiet, even if it meant more walking and more time in Tube stations. It was not kind of him to forget to tell Hermann until they were getting out of the cab that the friend was a guy he used to game with when Newt was living in Hong Kong and the flat was one room at the top of a string of rowhouses whose plumbing dated from sometime between the wars and not only had the guy failed to warn Newt about the skylight when he went out of town to visit his boyfriend in Aberdeen, or mentioned that the bed was more of a couch with an optimistic amount of blankets, or left a note about the stove needing to be lit by hand, he had copied exactly one key. It is easily the worst roommate situation Hermann can remember since he was in boarding school, and he has spent a great deal of his life avoiding situations with roommates no matter the inconvenience, the aggravation, or the cost.

The way Newt seems to consider pants a kind of optional accessory for the several hours after he wakes up (or doesn't bother with sleep after all) is not one of the things that makes it _worse_ , per se, but it is a complicating factor. It puts more of his tattoos on display, for example, increasing the chances that Newt will feel the need to tell Hermann every last detail of how he decided on the design, where he had the work done, what he likes best about it, some relevant kaiju trivia, seriously, has Hermann ever thought about getting some ink himself, like maybe that horrible baby Otachi they plugged their brains into, really, look, it's pretty cute if you draw it super-deformed. (He kept Newt's demonstration, since it was early enough in the night that he scribbled it on the back side of some sheet music of unknown provenance, not the back of his wrist or the inside of his palm. It is pretty cute, but cute is not something Hermann wants permanently on him.) It puts more of Newt on display, is the actual issue, and while he already knew his fellow-researcher had a remarkably trim body for the amount of Chinese junk food he seemed to shovel into it, the measurable dimensions of Newt's ass were not something he ever had the dispassionate opportunity to observe before. Or the tight muscles in his thighs, or the fact that his feet are blank and pale and bony, which Hermann finds improbably endearing. He looks like he's wearing socks. He sleeps in T-shirts for bands Hermann has never heard of and sprawls like a cat over a far greater percentage of the couch than someone of his height and weight should be able to cover and it isn't that he snores very loudly, because he doesn't, but it is a thin distinct purr with every exhaled breath and it is one of the pitches that Hermann can't sleep through, like fluorescent lights left on or the distant noise of cutting and welding torches in the hangars, when there were still Jaegers to need upkeep and the Shatterdome worked round the clock. The good news is that Newt doesn't sleep entire nights, or even nights at all sometimes. The bad news is that lights in the same room aren't something Hermann sleeps especially well through, either.

And so it's been four days now and the conference starts the day after tomorrow and some part of Hermann is sourly convinced that he's going to be too jet-lagged and sleep-starved and comprehensively out of sorts to sustain a civil conversation about coffee, never mind the algorithms that allowed him to predict the increasing frequency of kaiju events that led to the closing of the breach and the current, non-demolished state of humanity; he'll disappoint mathematicians the world over and any funding he might have hoped to get for further research into the really interesting topological curiosities he had to abandon when the PPDC came calling will go to some idiot with a nice smile and a good handshake and the ability not to sneer some really filthy Berlin invective at his roommate when he leaves the door to the tiny bathroom open while showering and the clouds of steam billowing through the room leave everything, Hermann included, as damp and wilted as cheap laundry. He is not a nice person to live with, in those situations where he couldn't avoid it he has never pretended to be, but he resents Newt for being blithely and obliviously _worse_. It's the one competition Newt doesn't seem to know they're having. Of course, he's winning hands-down.

The rest of Hermann is somewhat less sourly curious if they are going to make it through the weekend without having sex, in which case he will get even less sleep and want to talk to even fewer people and his spine will probably start complaining after the first time if it's any good. This outcome presumes that Newt has noticed how much trouble Hermann has not staring at him after he comes out of the ruinous shower, and doesn't mind, and possibly even spends some time of his own watching Hermann in his balding trousers and his buttoned shirts and his sweater vests that make him look ten years older than his calendar age, he's quite aware of that, thank you, it was why he started wearing them in the first place. (The parka is not part of the aesthetic. He fell in love with the damn thing when he realized how effortlessly it stopped his ears from getting cold. There are a lot of things Hermann Gottlieb can make himself look good in, for cranky, pedantic values of good, but woolly hats are not one of them and earmuffs are right out.) He isn't sure sometimes if he catches Newt looking quizzically at him because Newt thinks he's doing something funny, like reading Wittgenstein on Frazer to calm down before bed, or because Newt is also thinking about testing whether the appalling couch is the right height to bend one of them over, which Hermann thinks it might be, if the person getting bent is him. The question of addressing this subject with Newt is a moot one if Hermann's just projecting, fooling his brain into thinking it recognizes its own reflection. He's gathered quite easily that Newt is equal-opportunity when it comes to drunken, manic hookups and long-distance relationships that crash and burn in cascades of furious e-mail chats, but Hermann has the alcohol tolerance of his Ashkenazi forebears and they're three and a half meters apart at the best of times, for God's sake. He might not be Dr. Geiszler's type.

But he knows how it works in the Drift, even if it's been half a year since he puked his guts out in an uprooted toilet in Hong Kong's blue-smeared streets, and there are some things he knows his brain didn't invent on its own. He's never seen his face from that angle, irritably rearranging parameters until the screen stops looking existentially wrong; he's never watched himself limp across a catwalk and thought he looks like a goddamned mountaineer. He doesn't know for certain, but he thinks there was a flash of himself sleeping, dropped wearily across his desk with his head pillowed on his parka, and he thinks someone touched the fur of it, not his hair. It might not be impossible. That couch might turn out to be the right height after all. And who knows after that, if he just never has to live with Newt again.

**Author's Note:**

> The canon-compliance of this piece may be dubious in light of _Pacific Rim Uprising_ (2018), but the title comes from Newt's enthusiastic, introductory description of kaiju in _Pacific Rim_ (2013): "2500 tons of awesome . . . Or awful. You know, whatever you want to call it." Written September 2014.


End file.
